Obstacles found during the semester project

Library

No significant problems. There were some slight hiccups with UTF-16, as the gobo parser expects a BOM and so cannot parse UTF16LE or UTF-16BE. Unluckily for us, windows uses little-endian UTF-16.

EiffelStudio

Formatters require a certain property to be a lowercase string and read this directly from INTERFACE_NAMES, meaning that if the i18n library supplies a translated string that is not lowercase, an exception violation happens. This would superficially be relatively easy to fix, but it is not such a good idea to do this anyway, because with STRING_32 there may not even be a lowercase version of the string (asian scripts come to mind). This behaviour may also happen elsewhere, but I am not sure.

Problems encountered during the SA project

Problems we encountered during implementation

Unicode (UTF-8) support was not fully implemented (e.g. for gtk)

Facilities to write and read STRING_32 to/from files were not present

Difficulties to complete the translation of EiffelStudio:

Many strings are hard-coded anywhere inside EiffelStudio, making the translation difficult

All the functions taking strings as arguments expect a STRING, where they should expect a STRING_GENERAL, and they return a STRING which may not be applicable in every case. A STRING_32 can also represent the same content of a STRING_8, thus it should be preferred.

It seems that to_uppercase and to_lowercase procedures are not defined for STRING_32 and are used in the studio, these should have been implemented by the vision project and may be buggy.